Archive for Thu March 4 22:30, 2010

So, I went to pick up cat food and cat litter on Thursday and ran into something weird: The car refused to unlock via the keyless entry system, then when I had unlocked it, it refused to start, and began honking its horn and flashing its lights every couple of seconds. I finally got it reset and started. Don’t know what could’ve caused that, unless it was the car being started/moved/whatever via the spare key yesterday. It was a bit strange, but I got the cat food without further trouble.

Almost done with the Stephen Jay Gould compilation. It’s a lot to digest. One common thread of the essays is the sheer number of times that even respected subject matter experts are blinded by their personal prejudices when interpreting data. It’s easy for us to say “Piltdown Man? Totally fake!”, but radioisotope dating wasn’t practical at the time Piltdown Man was unearthed. Future generations will definitely be able to look at the 21st century and say, “Why didn’t they know X back then? It’s totally obvious!” Well, science is often a matter of figuring out what data is actually relevant, and what data is totally bogus. The bogus stuff tends to outnumber the relevant stuff by at least 9 to 1.